The Reckoning (4 page)

Just then the sun cracked the night. The haze lit like fire. In the sudden flare of color, it was hard to see. The figures began to dissipate. That distant bell rang across the fields. Its single note vibrated in the air.

Molly felt the heat against her face. “I have to see that bell someday,” she said.

Next morning, he was waiting for her again. It was clear. Since she was going to persist in these morning walks, he would accompany her. Their walks became for her the high point of every day.

When Kleat heard about her new friend, he advised her to dump Samnang. “Ditch him,” he said. “The old man's KR. Or was.”

KR was a universal phrase, part of every language spoken in Cambodia. Khmer Rouge, a French label, the Red Khmers, red for Communist, red for blood. “That's crazy,” she said. “He was a professor at the university. How could he be KR? They killed people like him.”

“Open your eyes. You haven't seen him with the men? He never raises his voice, and he's a cripple. But they always do what he tells them. One word and it's done.”

“That's how it's supposed to work, Kleat.”

“But they're
afraid
of him.”

It made no sense to a guy like Kleat how this gentlest of men was able to control the pent-up tempest of the workers. Born and raised in violent refugee camps, many of the local Khmer men were semi-wild. At night some got drunk in their villages, gambled, beat their women, and bloodied each other with knives and axes. Molly had pictures of that, too.

But even the worst toughs obeyed Samnang without question. “They respect him,” she said.

“He has a power over them,” Kleat argued.

“Like voodoo?”

“Laugh. He's KR, I tell you.”

“The KR don't exist anymore.”

“Tell that to the workers. They have their memories.”

“If he was KR, what's he doing here?”

“The same thing you're doing,” Kleat said to her. “Making a buck. Doing penance. I don't know.”

Duncan was sitting there. He said it was none of Kleat's business, even if Samnang had been KR. “Everyone has secrets they'd rather forget.”

“Not secrets like that,” Kleat said.

“Let up,” Duncan said. “Survival always has a price tag.”

At the end of her third week, Samnang approached Molly. “I have something to show you.”

They rode in a Land Cruiser hired from three brothers who lived in Samnang's hometown, Kampong Cham. The driver, a heavily tattooed boy, drove them to a nearby village. The village was built on stilts for the rainy season. There were even bridges between some of the huts, and a dock with canoes lying on the dirt. It seemed inconceivable the land could ever be flooded. Water was their faith, a phantom thing, nothing Molly could believe in. All she'd seen since arriving was dry, cracked earth.

On a slight hill beyond the village there was a shack with a corrugated tin roof and no walls. Inside sat a cheap cement Buddha, like a garden gnome. To one side, hanging from the rafters, was the bell.

Samnang took a small hammer and rang it for her. The pitch was perfect.

She was delighted, and went closer. “But it's made from an old bomb shell,” she said.

“Yes.” Samnang was pleased by her surprise. “It is inescapable, don't you think? That the rubble should be turned into order. Even into beauty.”

“No,” she answered. “I would think it was the other way around. Beauty fades. Civilizations grind to dust. I would say loss is the norm. Chaos. Noise. Not music.”

Samnang touched the bell with his fingertips. “But you see?” he said. “They have restored themselves from the horror.”

On May 29, a dog brought a human femur to the site.

Molly got a picture of the dog just before one of the Cambodian soldiers shot it, the bone still in its mouth. The Americans rushed over, excited that this might be evidence of their missing pilot. But one glance told them it was another false lead. The thighbone didn't come close to matching a six-foot Caucasian's. It could not belong to their pilot.

Very possibly the bone had come from a mass grave somewhere in the region. Killing fields hid everywhere, even around here. After every rainy season, bones cropped up, often no more than tiny white fragments. In the beginning, Molly had mistaken the crushed bits along the outer paths for bleached seashells. Then she'd spied checkered fragments of disintegrating scarves mixed among them and realized she was walking on the dead.

Curious to see what would happen, Molly followed the bone. The forensic anthropologist with RE-1 judged the femur to be Southeast Asian Mongoloid. He wrapped it in bubble wrap and turned it over to their Cambodian liaison officer. The liaison officer kept the bubble wrap and gave the bone to a soldier, who tossed it into a distant ditch, dog food again.

She watched it all through her telephoto lens. Then she saw Samnang go over. Looking around to make sure no one saw him, he took the bone and buried it by a tree. He lit a stick of incense, and she realized that Kleat was right.

Samnang was guilty. He probably had been KR. Finding the dead was his way of doing penance.

One of the Cambodian soldiers, or a villager, perhaps, must have seen Samnang ministering to the bone and drew the same conclusion. There were eyes everywhere, factions and subfactions and jealousies. For one reason or another, KR or not, Samnang was dismissed from the dig that evening.

The purge was swift. Molly heard about it at the last minute. She rushed to the road to say good-bye, but the truck carrying him away was already leaving. She caught his face in her camera, and he turned his eyes away from her. She figured that was the last she'd ever see of him.

As the red dust settled, Molly saw a figure watching the departure from out in the fields. At first she thought it was the gypsy kid standing in the ball of the sinking sun. But when she shaded her eyes, he turned into Kleat, and she realized who had gotten rid of old Samnang.

By then the dig was nearly done. Their dead reckoning had failed. The crash site looked like a carcass—rice paddies breached, dirt piled by the sifting screens, holes collapsing, and grid strings let loose—and still the pilot eluded them. After a month of brute labor, RE-1 had pulled up hundreds of pieces of the cockpit and fuselage and wings, seemingly everything but the bones that were their quest.

As they reached the end of the crash trajectory, the Americans sensed their failure. They took it personally. Their high hopes came tumbling down. One night, at the beginning of June, two of the youngest marines got into a fistfight over a stolen
Hustler
magazine. They fought like jealous teenagers, and everyone was embarrassed by the display.

After the captain got the two fighters separated, it turned out that others, including Molly, had suffered petty thefts, too, mostly letters and snapshots from home. Whoever it was had snitched her barber's scissors. The culprit, probably some desperately poor Khmer—though Kleat made sure to accuse the roaming gypsy—never was caught.

The stealing was almost beside the point. What mattered about the fight and the thefts was that it suddenly became clear their losses outweighed their gains. Their daily miseries—the spiraling heat, the snakes and bugs, the dust of dried paddy sewage that festered in their sinuses, and a hundred other small things—could no longer be sustained with hope. Whether the pilot had ejected or been cast loose of the jet or dragged away, it was plain they were not going to find him.

As if to hasten their departure, they received news that a typhoon was building to super class in the South China Sea. With winds in excess of 150 miles per hour, it already equaled a class 4 Atlantic hurricane. The navy meteorologists could not say when and where it might strike land, in four days or six or ten, in Malaysia, Thailand, or Cambodia. But it was sure to usher in the mother of all monsoons. The rains would come. The roads would turn to grease and the paddies would fill. Rivers would run backward. The villages would turn into islands.

On the evening of June 7, the captain invited Molly, Kleat, and Duncan to a private gathering inside his wall tent. He had lawn chairs for them and coffee mugs for the last of his Johnnie Walker Black.

“We're terminating the recovery,” he told them. The search was over. He had already broken the news to his team. “I wanted to tell you separately. To thank each of you for your hard work.”

Molly sat back, stunned. Her shock was a curiosity to her. For at least a week now, she had been trying to invent a story that glossed over the fact that she was essentially writing about empty holes. “It's over?” she said.

“Can't you hear?” said Kleat. “It's done.”

Duncan tried to rally the captain. “You don't give up on the good ones,” he said.

“We're not, Duncan,” the captain said. “But at a certain point you say, enough.”

“A few days more,” said Duncan. “Where else could he be?”

For Molly's sake, the captain said, “I'm disappointed, too.”

“There will be other seasons, other excavations,” Kleat said. He was adamant.

Other chances,
she thought, but not for her. The
Times
had not sent her to write about barren dirt, not after a pitch entitled “Sacred Ground.” The bottom line was that without the bones for a climax, her story was not a
Times
story at all.

“We start redeploying tomorrow,” the captain said. “I'll arrange transportation for you.”

Molly went through the motions of the captain's farewell celebration. Afterward, she meandered through camp, dealing with the let-down. She could hear soldiers through their tent walls. They were excited to be going back home.

The paper was covering her travel expenses, and she'd get a kill fee for her trouble. Maybe one of the airline magazines would take a condensed version, and she could spin off a travel piece for the
Denver Post.
She'd never recoup the cost of the camera, though. Ten grand. She'd gambled big, and lost.

On a whim, she took a few pickup shots of the camp. Wasting battery juice just to waste it, she paused by a hole that had once been the village well and fired her flash into the darkness, not even aiming. There was nothing to see with the naked eye. The hole was deep and the flash too quick, and when she kicked a pebble, it plunked on water so stagnant it smelled gray.

She didn't bother looking at the image on her camera display, just turned it off and returned to her tent. She began packing some of her things, but that only made her feel worse. Lying down, she held the camera overhead and flipped on the display.

The bones were waiting for her.

She gaped at the illuminated image. How could a camera see through water? Actually it was possible with a long enough time lapse. But she'd used a flash. The light would have bounced off the water.

There was a hint of poorly focused white sticks beneath the water. Garbage, she decided. Twigs tossed in by children or the wind. More digital noise. She turned the camera off, then on, to see if the image corrected itself. This time, there was a rib cage and a long tail-like spine.

An animal, she thought. Then saw the skull.

First thing the next morning, filled with excitement and disbelief, they lowered one of the marines on a rope, by his ankles, headfirst. He took a deep breath. They dunked him into the water, gave him sixty seconds, and then hauled him, soaking wet, back up the shaft and into the sunlight. He held a handful of human vertebrae. There was more, he said, much more.

Things got noisy fast. They snaked hoses down the well shaft and the pumps roared. They rigged a klieg light over the hole, and fired up another generator. As the water drained off and small glittering shrimp writhed in the mud and water weeds, the brown tips of bones jutted up like driftwood.

They lowered a man again. This time he brought up two skulls.

“What in God's name,” a soldier muttered.

Their forensic anthropologist examined the skulls. Neither was Caucasian. One belonged to a child. The nuchal crest at the base of the skull was rounded, the forehead smooth, the wisdom teeth not yet descended, the whole aspect gracile. Probably female, he said, probably eight to ten years old. He laid it on the ground and went to join the others peering into the hole.

“The fucking KR,” Kleat said.

It was a mass grave, not fifty feet from their camp.

Duncan knelt down and took the skull. “Look at you, poor bug,” he whispered.

“What?” said Molly, not sure she'd heard.

He looked up at her, and there was a streak down his mask of red dust. Through her lens, at first she thought it was sweat. But it was a tear for the nameless girl. She got the picture.

The find staggered them, the enormity of the murders. They were familiar with the killing fields. All had seen the displays of bones in places like Phnom Penh. But this was slick and shiny. The event of death seemed unfiltered, unprocessed. It could have been yesterday.

Just the same, it was not their pilot. They switched off the pumps and cut the light. Their eleventh-hour hope went as dark as midnight.

The captain turned away. “That's that,” he said. “Let the Cambodians have it. This isn't ours.”

But Duncan would not give up. “He's down there,” he told them. “I'd stake my life on it.”

The captain turned to him. “Duncan,” he said softly, “the cockpit is two miles away.”

“The well was used for burial once, why not before?” Duncan said. “Think about it, the morning after the plane crashed. There's metal and wire lying everywhere, a windfall of riches. But also there's this body of a stranger, and not just a body. A ghost.”

“Ghosts,” Kleat scoffed.

“A serious liability in these parts,” said Duncan. “These are peasants straight out of the tenth century. I've spent time among them. They see spirits everywhere. Tiger spirits. Forest spirits. Witches flying in the night, drinking people's blood. They've already got their hands full with ancestors. Now suddenly a body falls from the sky. What would you do? Conduct a respectful Buddhist cremation? For a stranger? Waste a week going off to find the authorities? Authorities, by the way, who might try to lay claim to your plane parts. The body was a nuisance. A pollution. So they dumped him here.”

“Into their drinking water?” said the captain.

“It's an old well in an abandoned village. And the tradition could have carried over. Years later, when the Khmer Rouge needed a dumping ground, some villager might have led them to the same well.”

“There's no way to be sure the pilot is underneath the rest of them.”

“There's only one way to be sure he's not,” Duncan answered.

“We've never encountered a situation like this,” said the captain. “Never.”

And yet Duncan had planted the possibility among them. Suddenly it seemed that week after week, they might have been digging farther away from what they were looking for. And now the dead from one era could be hiding the dead from another.

But they could not simply dredge up the bones to see what lay at the bottom. The Cambodian liaisons suddenly became officious and prickly. There were problems, it developed, diplomatic, jurisdictional, archaeological, and cultural. Molly loved it. With a single, giant twist, her story had not only been saved, but was taking on dimensions she'd never dreamed of.

Among other things, as a matter of policy, American bones were supposed to be separated from Southeast Asian Mongoloid remains at the site of excavation rather than at the central lab in Hawaii. The Department of Defense had learned the hard way how difficult it was to repatriate Asiatic remains. The Vietnamese government, especially, regarded any bones found in the proximity of American remains as those of
ling nguy,
or South Vietnamese puppet soldiers.

There were also issues of territorial authority. This might be a shared underworld, but it happened to lie within Cambodian soil. Who owned the dead? Should the Cambodian authorities be the ones to oversee the excavation of the well? Did that place American soldiers in the role of undertakers for Cambodian citizens? What if there was no American pilot beneath the layer of Khmer Rouge victims? Did the Cambodians even want the mass grave to be exhumed? The competing interests created a tension that made her story at once international, delicate, and highly emotional.

The captain ordered the area around the well ringed off. There was a process to be observed, channels to go through. Cambodian soldiers were posted around the camp to keep away the locals. The men on the labor crew were told to return to their villages. The captain, the forensic anthropologist, and their Cambodian counterparts all retired to a tent and began placing satellite calls to their headquarters. Instructed to stay away from the site, Molly and the others waited in whatever shade they could find. Hours went by.

The team members couldn't get over it. They treated Molly like a seer, as if she had a gift for this. “How did you know to look down there?” one asked.

“I didn't,” she said.

“But you went right to it.”

“Yeah, after four weeks, right to it.”

As the day dragged on and they still sat idle, Kleat stewed. “What are they doing in there? We could be down clearing the hole.”

“It's not that easy,” Duncan said. “They're on to us by now.”

“Who?” said Molly.

“The locals. These are the dead they inherited their earth from, literally, the original owners of the land they're farming. The villagers could demand to cover the bones over or burn them to ash. One way or another, they'll have to exorcise the spirits.”

“Screw their boogeymen,” Kleat said.

Molly began to worry. The captain emerged from the tent with a frown on his face, took a long breath, and returned inside. Plainly, he was getting nowhere fast. Once more she felt her story slipping away. They needed proof.

While the rest of the team nodded off in the heat or waved away flies, she got to her feet, ducked under the tape, and stood beside the well. It was darker than ever down there. Expecting nothing, she snapped another blind shot of the depths, then pulled up the image on her display.

“What you got this time, Molly?” someone called to her.

She looked up from her camera display. “You need to see this,” she said.

They stirred and came out into the high sun and crowded around. The display was full of muddled bones…and something else. They all saw it. Mixed among the skulls was a flight helmet. “You've done it again,” Duncan whispered.

At 1700 hours—Molly had acquired military time—an American helicopter landed on the road, bearing a colonel and two Cambodian government officials wearing sunglasses. Molly went out with the others to photograph them, and was surprised to see how many villagers had flocked to the area. The Cambodian soldiers were keeping them at a distance from the camp.

The colonel was not pleased. “Quite the circus,” he shouted to the captain as the rotors wound down. Dust flew everywhere. He gestured at Molly. “Who's this?”

“She's the
Times
journalist I told you about,” the captain said.

The colonel did not shake her hand or thank her. “You were shooting the bones,” he said.

“I didn't know what was down there,” Molly told him. His unfriendliness confused her. Hadn't she just provided them with proof?

The colonel looked away from her. He noticed Duncan and his long hair and Che shirt. “And him?”

Molly saw the captain's throat tighten. “A local archaeologist,” he said.

“All right,” the colonel declared, “let's get this thing under control.” The captain led him and the officials to the mess tent. An hour later the colonel and the officials departed on the helicopter.

The captain announced that the excavation would resume in the morning. They had been granted a week—seven days—no more. After that the site would be returned to the kingdom of Cambodia. “We've got our work cut out for us,” he said. “If he's down there, we'll find him.”

There were high fives, and Duncan whistled through his fingers. The captain did not smile. He asked Molly and Duncan and Kleat to join him.

There was no Johnnie Walker Black this evening. The meeting was brief. He was grim. “Due to the sensitive nature of the mission,” he informed them, “your presence is no longer expedient.”

Molly's mouth fell open.

“ ‘Expedient,' ” said Kleat. “What the hell does that mean?”

The captain's lips pressed thin. Clearly he had argued. Clearly he had lost. “I have been advised to compress the operation to essential personnel only. We're letting go of the work crew.” He added, “And you.”

“You can't do that to us,” Kleat said. “I've paid my dues. Year after year—”

“Be ready to leave at 0700 tomorrow morning,” the captain said.

Duncan appealed, not for himself, but for Molly. “Without her, you'd have nothing,” he said.

The captain looked ill. He lowered his eyes. “That will be all,” he said.